Chapter 2

• Three days ago, an email hit my encrypted inbox.
• I knew the sender. Codename “Fisherman.”
• My biggest client. Also the first one who ever found me.
• He was a lawyer—or at least I thought he was.
• The way he talked, the file formats he sent, the account names he used for transfers, all pointed to a firm in Riverton called Zenith.
• In the past two years, he’s had me wipe seven sound signatures.
• Every time, it's evidence against his clients.
• I never asked questions. He never volunteered answers.
• His transfers were always on time, never late. He’d even send a little extra on holidays with a note that said, “Thanks for the hard work.” For a while, I thought he was a decent guy.
• But this time, he didn’t send a delete order.
• It was an audio clip.
• I hit play.
• There was only one word in it. A woman’s voice. Bright with youth, touched by maturity. Safe to assume she's in her early twenties.
• “Dad.”
• It was followed by a dull thump, like something heavy hitting water. Not a rock. A body.
• I’d heard it too many times to count. I could pick it out with my eyes closed—the sound of a human body dropping from height into water. A sharp slap as it broke the surface, a heavy thud as the water parted, and finally the bubbling rush of air boiling up.
• The whole clip was short, one point seven seconds.
• Under it was a single line.
• “Tomorrow this sound signature will show up in your sonar system. Don’t do a thing. If the cops ask, this recording doesn’t exist.”
• I didn’t reply.
• But I knew what it meant: tomorrow a body would drift past. A woman. And her death would be stamped “suicide” or “accidental drowning.”
• Because the clip he’d sent ahead of time proved she’d been pushed from up high—that “Dad” wasn’t her calling out to some dad far away. It was her saying the killer’s name right before she died.
• The killer was someone she knew. Someone she called father.
• I didn’t sleep that night.
• I laid on the cot in the station, listening to the river.
• Greenwood Dam released water at night. More flow. The river sounded like distant thunder rolling down from upstream.
• The tin roof over the station creaked in the wind, like something was pacing back and forth up there.
• I kept turning one thing over in my head: why did Fisherman send me the clip early?
• He’d never done that before.
• Usually the body drifted past, and only after the sonar logged it would he reach out and tell me to delete it.
• But this time, the body hadn’t even shown up yet, and the audio was already in my hands.
• Two possibilities.
• One, he was testing me. He wanted to see if I’d crack under pressure and do something I shouldn’t—like call the cops, or make a backup.
• Two, he didn’t trust me anymore. He was flexing: 'I can get the sound signature before the body hits your grid, which means I’ve got ways outside your station. You try to trace me? You won’t.'
• Either way, I felt like a fish on a hook.
• At three in the morning, I got up, imported Fisherman’s clip into the sonar system’s local database, and left it untagged. Just parked it there, like bait.
• Then I texted Sofia. “How’re your eyes lately? Still hurting?”
• She didn’t answer. She rarely ever did.
• Not because she didn't want to, but because Hanna wouldn’t let her use a phone. The doctor said screens were bad for her eyes, so Hanna took Sofia’s phone away. I got it, but it still stung.
• At eleven the next morning, the sonar system screamed.
• New sound signature detected, three hundred meters downstream.
• I pulled up the waveform and compared it to the one Fisherman sent.
• Perfect match. Timestamp, frequency profile, background noise—hell, even the pitch curve on “Dad.” Not just similar. One hundred percent identical.
• Which meant the clip he sent me had been exported straight from our sonar system. But how the hell did he get it before the body showed up?
• Unless—there was a backdoor in the system I didn’t know about. Or he could hit the station server directly.
• I swung the security camera toward the river.
• A body was drifting down from the dam.
• White puffer jacket, face down, long hair spread on the surface like an upside-down white jellyfish.
• The jacket was full of air, keeping her upper body afloat while her legs hung straight down, like a buoy standing upright. She drifted past the station and snagged on the trash rack two hundred meters below.
• The white jacket hung off the iron bars like a flag of surrender.
• I grabbed the phone and dialed Fisherman’s number.